I think Open Sourcing the Flash player it would be a good *businness* decision.
What developers fear the most is fragmentation, the HTML example is always the bad reference. But I don't see that happening with MP3 players, or USBs, or.... you name it. There are a lot of examples of open formats with several players without massive fragmentation. What I would fear the most, however, is slowness to move the player forward. Just take a look JS and ECMAScript or HTML and the W3C. It takes them ages to make the tiniest of the improvements because there're several companies involved with very different insterests. I think that if Adobe keeps a tight control of the format and plays the good dictator role, it could really work. Releasing the player under the GPL for example will prevent Microsoft to embed the player into Silverlight and support SWFs out of the box (well, unless they open Silverlight which I don't think would happen). An Open Source player would mean Flash in every single Linux distro out there. And more devices. And more crazy innovation around the Flash platform... Just check what Adobe did with Webkit (an engine): took it and integrated it in another VM along with the Flash player. Really cool. Let alone the fact the MS will eventually catch up with Silverlight. I wonder if they won't bundle it with IE at some point... Again, I think it would be a good business decision. Juan 2009/3/27 Evert | Rooftop <[email protected]>: > Hey guys, > > Just reading bits and pieces from these threads, I just have one small point > to make. > > Aside from practical issues targeting for gnash and otherwise, which I can > completely agree with; I feel there's a bit of negativity around free flash > players in general. > > Although they might not be up to par with adobe's player, I feel the effort > is something we should all promote and support. > Open source has helped us all tremendously, and an open flash player is > something is not some special edge case. > > If you don't believe in the open source spirit, and you're perhaps just a > leech. you should still understand that competition drives innovation. > > I personally run the adobe flash player, but look forward to the day there's > solid viable alternatives. > > </end of rant> > Evert > _______________________________________________ > osflash mailing list > [email protected] > http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/osflash_osflash.org > > -- Juan Delgado - Zárate http://zarate.tv http://blog.zarate.tv _______________________________________________ osflash mailing list [email protected] http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/osflash_osflash.org
